BAGHDAD, Iraq – Pfc. Gregory Stovall felt the explosion on his face. He was standing in the turret of a Humvee, manning a machine gun, when the roadside bomb went off. At the time, he was guarding a convoy of trucks making a mail run.
In an instant, Stovall’s face was perforated by shrapnel, the index finger on his right hand was blown off, and his middle finger was left hanging by a tendon. But the 22-year-old from Brooklyn remembers instinctively reaching for his chest and stomach – “to make sure everything was there,” he said.
It was, encased in a Kevlar vest reinforced by boron carbide ceramic plates that are so hard they can stop AK-47 rounds traveling 2,750 feet per second.
Therefore, on the morning of Nov. 4, Stovall became the latest in a long line of soldiers serving in Iraq to be saved by the U.S. military’s new Interceptor body armor.
This high-tech system – the Kevlar vest and “small-arms protective inserts,” which the troops call SAPI plates – is dramatically reducing the kind of torso injuries that have killed soldiers on the battlefield in past wars.
Soldiers will not patrol without the armor – that is, if they can get it. As of now, there is not enough to go around. Going into the war in Iraq, the Army decided to outfit only dismounted combat soldiers with the plated vests, which cost about $1,500 each. But when Iraqi insurgents began ambushing convoys and killing clerks as well as combat troops, controversy erupted.
Last month, Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, and 102 other House members wrote to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to demand hearings on why the Pentagon has been unable to provide all U.S. service members in Iraq with the latest body armor. In the letter, the lawmakers cite reports that parents of soldiers have been purchasing body armor and sending it to troops in Iraq.
The demand came after Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, told a House Appropriations subcommittee in September that he could not “answer for the record why we started this war with protective vests that were in short supply.”
With the armor, “it’s the difference between being hit with a fist or with a knife,” said Ben Gonzalez, chief of the emergency room at the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, the largest Army hospital in the country, which treats the majority of wounded soldiers.
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, began investigating the Army’s decision not to equip all troops deploying to Iraq with Interceptor body armor after learning that one of his students, reservist Richard Murphy, was in the country with a Vietnam-era flak jacket.
“There’s been an overwhelming effort to get the military every possible resource,” Turley said. “To have such an item denied to troops in Iraq was a terrible oversight.”
At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Nov. 19, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the committee’s chairman, told acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee that the shortage of body armor in Iraq was “totally unacceptable.”
“Now, where was the error – and I say it’s an error made in planning – to send those troops to forward-deployed regions, and the conflict in Iraq, without adequate numbers of body armor?” Warner asked.
Before approving the administration’s $87 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress added hundreds of millions of dollars for more body armor and other systems to protect soldiers from roadside bombs and ambushes.
“It’s a security blanket,” Stovall said from his hospital bed, awaiting a medical evacuation flight to Germany with his hand bandaged. “If only they had a glove, I might have my finger, but I’m thankful that I’m here.”
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